The present paper provides an overview of literature on the shift to services. It follows the three dimensions of structural change - final demand, the inter-industry division of labor and inter-industry productivity differences. It first looks at the "classics", however (Fisher (1935), Clark...

This paper investigates the major drivers of the public debt growth in 184 countries. Our analysis consists in a cross-country survey, which is conducted on the basis of the improved compilation of datasets on the central government debt for 2013. In order to differentiate between...

Money, in this paper, is defined as a power relationship of a specific kind, a stratified social debt relationship, measured in a unit of account determined by some authority. A brief historical examination reveals its evolving nature in the process of social provisioning. Money not only...

Many studies have estimated the growth effects of globalization where globalization was measured with a few economic variables, ignoring its social and political dimensions. Recently Dreher (2006) has developed a comprehensive measure of globalization with several variables from the economic,...

Why did monetary authorities hold large gold reserves under Bretton Woods (1944-1971) when only the US had to? We argue that gold holdings were driven by institutional memory and persistent habits of central bankers. Countries continued to back currency in circulation with gold reserves,...

According to Acemoglu, Robinson and Johnson (2002), institutional divergence prior to the Industrial Revolution is the fundamental cause of differences in income levels across countries. To quantify the impact of institutions on long-run growth rates that drive the differences in levels, we...

This paper derives the speed of convergence to steady state in the Malthusian world, and provides some rough estimates. The basic message is that the half life of a shock in a Malthusian economy was probably quite long, on the order of two centuries. Various extensions, such as capital...

We identify similarities and differences in the scale and nature of the banking crises in 2008-2009 and the Great Depression, and analyse differences in the policy response to the two crises in light of the prevailing international monetary systems. We find that the scale of the banking crisis,...

This study addresses the need for an early warning system of financial distress of nations, amply demonstrated by failures in Mexico and South East Asia. We find that financial ratios of failing nations, and those of failing corporations, display similar patterns. A neural network was trained on...

In this paper two basic policy paradigms are distinguished: updated liberalism that is fully aware of the limits to markets and therefore aims at their active regulation, and neo-liberalism that is based on market fundamentalism and aims at privatisation, deregulation and budgetary austerity....